talked of shooting it during September, when the water begins to lower
definitely for the winter months. That would give us the longest possible time
for strengthening the dam. If this wasn’t a sheer accident, it was done by a
madman,--the vulture who feared the Eagle would snatch away his feast. I know
of no better simile. Gentlemen, I fear you will have to cope with a madman who
ran amuck when he discovered my absence and feared that I would betray the
whole scheme to the government. He could see nothing but disaster in that. If
he deliberately blew up the dam, it was with a crazy notion of forestalling
the government. I don’t know; I hid the battery.”
He was leading them up on the high bank on the north side of the wash by a
narrow trail he knew. Even in his haste he remembered that the lives of great
men must not be placed in danger, and he had not needed the reminder of the
engineer that it was a risky proceeding, blowing in the dam at the height of
this sporadic high water. Not so high as to overflow its banks, it is true,
but with not too wide a margin of safety, either.
No man there knew better than Peter what an unexpected breakage would do, no
man there felt more keenly the elements of disaster, once his first exultation
over their disbelief had passed; a flare of triumph over the wise ones. Peter
had been on that river just yesterday. His launch was still at Needles, where
he had left it to take the train for Barstow. He had arrived in Las Vegas on
the train which brought the private car of the Commission. He had planned it
so, to be sure of seeing them, and also to conceal his errand from the two
Cramers, whose rage would not have stopped at murder, it is likely, had they
known what was in his mind.
When Peter had embarked in his launch, the river was running forty-three
thousand second feet. He had looked at the gauge. He had not known how the
government gauge had read at Needles when his train left there, but he did not
doubt the word of the engineer. There had been unusual, heavy storms in
Colorado, Wyoming, Utah. An edge of it had swept his own State. To attempt to
dam that sweeping flood was, as he had named it, madness.
Once up the bank they walked rapidly. Rawley, glancing back, saw other
automobiles stop behind their car, and men trailing after them up the bank. It
was a somewhat circuitous route; he wondered if his party would follow Peter
so patiently if they knew that they could have driven to the water’s edge.
They were walking half a mile when they might have ridden. But Peter was
taking no risk.
They reached the high bank of the river just as the moon slipped--like the
face of a boy who has been peering over a stone wall and who has lost his
footing--dropped suddenly out of sight, and left the river dark, the far hills
gilded tantalizingly with its white light. The party halted.
“She’s dammed,” Peter said tersely.
“I can hear it running,” some one objected.
“I know every sound of this river,” said Peter impatiently. “I’ve listened to
it all my life. You hear a seepage fighting the rocks in the channel. It’s no
bigger than a trout stream now. This way, gentlemen.”
In the blackness before dawn, made blacker to them by the sudden desertion of
the moon, Peter struck into the burro trail Rawley knew so well.
The familiar path brought a sharp longing for Nevada, whom he had left in
anger some months before. Of course she had not been plotting with Young Jess
against him! Once his hurt pride let him think clearly, Rawley knew that she
had been trying to save him. She would naturally suppose that they had gone
straight toward the canyon, and she was encouraging Jess to waste time looking
among the rocks, never dreaming that they were there. Many a time Rawley
cursed the King temper for letting him taunt her with her Indian blood. He had
wanted to hurt. His instinct had led him to the words that would sting
sharpest, even though she believed him as much Indian as herself.
Men before him and behind were talking--short-breathed over the pace Peter was
unconsciously setting them--of the dam, its probable strength and the danger
of a disastrous flood if it held a while and then failed to hold. Rawley
walked among them, thinking of Nevada, wondering if she would ever forgive him
for what he had said to her. Strangely enough, of Young Jess’s hate and
promised revenge he did not think at all. Nevada’s resentment, her
forgiveness,--these were the things that mattered. The dam was an incident, a
job for others to handle. Rawley’s whole thought was of persuading a girl to
forget a dozen words which he had spoken in blind fury.
Then, looking across at the piled hills beyond the river (the hills of
Arizona), the white radiance faded, chilled, merged into the crepuscule that
threatened to deepen again to darkness. The moon was retreating before the
coming of the sun.
The twilight brightened, pulled lavender and rose from the dawn and spread
over the hills a radiant, opal-tinted veil. The great men stopped and faced
the dawn, and forgot the problems set by the great Teacher for human minds to
solve, and, in the solving, grow to greater things. The Governor removed his
hat and stood, head bared, waiting for the coming of the sun. The heralds
flung banners of royal purple and gold. The hills laid aside the thin veil of
enchantment and spread a soft carpet of gray and brown.
The King appeared, a ruddy disk with broad bars of purple cloud before his
face. The heavens blazed with the glory of a new day. Somewhere behind them,
in hidden mesquite bush, a mocking bird began singing reverently its morning
aria.
Eyes left the savage wonder of the wilderness greeting the dawn and dropped to
the crippled Colorado.
In a dark canyon drab bars of silt stretched like gigantic crocodiles upon the
river’s bed, with the shiny humps of moss-slimed bowlders in between. Rosy
pools of still water reflected the barbaric dawn clouds above. Ridges of
water-worn gravel. A thin swift current was fighting the huge rocks in the
channel with a great splutter and turmoil of spray flung up. Smaller streams
were worming impatiently aslant the river bed to join the stream fighting so
valiantly in the channel.
Already the main current was yielding, choked by the neighbor mountain that
had suddenly assailed it from above. Against the rocks the sun painted
inexorably the mark of its surrender.
Peter looked down upon the river bed and saw his splendid dream come true. For
a moment his exultation returned. He looked at the Governor.
“I believe, sir, that the Cramer Dam is a complete success!” A ringing note of
pride was in his voice.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
THE VULTURE FEASTS
They walked on, heads turned toward the spectacle. The sun, rising higher,
splashed a mellow light into the deep crannies between the bowlders, set the
bald pates of smoothed granite rocks a-gleam,--rocks never before uncovered in
the history of man.
Rawley turned and looked curiously at Peter, whose eyes were upon the river
bed while his feet stumbled along the trail. They were anxious to reach the
dam, every man of them. The engineer was stepping out briskly, keen glances
going to the cliffs up-river; but for all their haste they could not forebear
to gaze down at the stark, denuded canyon bottom, where a great river had been
halted in its headlong rush.
“Well, Uncle Peter, you’ve had your wish,” Rawley said at last. “You said you
were waiting for the day when you could show the Colorado who was boss. You
wanted to stop it. It’s stopped.”
Peter looked at him, smiling faintly.
“I was just thinking of Johnny Buffalo, that last night,” he said, speaking so
that the others, straggling along the trail, would not hear. “What was that he
said? ‘You will succeed, and fail in the succeeding. And from the failure you
will rise to greater things’--or something like that. It just struck me. I
wonder if he meant,--this.” He tilted his head toward the river. “I’ve
succeeded. I’ve stopped the Colorado, and shown it who’s boss. But it isn’t
like I dreamed it, after all. I’ve got a hunch, boy, that we’ll never work
that dredger. Maybe the government will have other ideas about that. It was a
self-centered plan, I admit that now. It had no right to succeed. The folks
below need the river. I hadn’t figured them into the calculations at all.”
Jerry Newton overheard that last observation and stepped faster until he was
just behind them.
“Did you ever see a flood, Mr. Cramer? I covered Pueblo and several other
places; was down South, that last big one. Families down below here are
getting out,--and believe me, they are making it snappy! I’ll bet you couldn’t
find a breakfast cooked in its own kitchen, down below here, to save your
life! They know what a flood means, and this is going to be like the crack o’
doom when it comes. Sudden, what I mean. They’ve been tickling the gas levers,
believe me, since that blast went off.”
Peter turned and looked at him, frowning.
“What makes you all take it for granted the dam won’t hold?” he queried
resentfully. “It would, I’d stake my life on it almost, though it should have
been shot in low water, or falling water. This high water is not going to
last. It’s the run-off of a big general storm, and I believe the peak is past,
anyway. You don’t realize the size of the Cramer Dam. And you seem to forget
altogether the auxiliary dam that can be thrown in, any time it seems
necessary.”
Jerry Newton saw the point, but he saw something else, and being a blunt young
man by nature, he blurted a retort.
“If you’re so sure of its holding, Mr. Cramer, what are you so worried about?”
Peter’s eyes hardened.
“Lives, young fellow. Two of them dear to me.”
The A. P. man was silenced. He looked contritely at Peter’s back, but he could
not think of anything to say.
“Look there!” The engineer, hurrying along in the lead, stopped and pointed.
“That’s what I call enterprise. But it’s taking a chance I shouldn’t care
about, myself.”
The party pulled up, facing the river. They had reached the lower edge of the
basin, about where Rawley and Johnny Buffalo had camped. The bank here was
high and rocky as the canyon opened slowly its mouth. The river had been
forced to a narrower channel, and it held therefore a deeper bed.
Away down there in the middle of it, almost at the edge of the channel
fighting still to hold its own, a bent figure was groping, bent almost double,
eyes to the ground. Now and then it knelt and clawed in slimy pools. Then it
went on, inch by inch, like a child picking pretty pebbles on a beach.
“Old Jess!” cried Rawley. “Peter, it’s Old Jess! Call to him! He’ll step into
a hole--there’s quicksand--or if the dam breaks--”
“He’s crazy!” several of the party spoke the words at once, as sometimes
happens, unconsciously forming an impromptu chorus. “Call him out of there!”
“He wouldn’t come!” Peter was starting toward the edge, seeking a trail down.
Rawley, running ahead to the place where he used to bring up water, was down
before him.
“Go back! I’ll get him,” shouted Peter, scrambling after, and those left at
the top gesticulated and shouted.
“You go back,” Rawley cried over his shoulder. “One’s enough!” Then, having
reached the bottom, he started out.
The vulture saw them, and flapped his arms and screamed vituperations in a
reasonless rage, greed-mad, thinking they were come to rob him.
Slipping, sliding among the bowlders that piled the river bed in places, the
two ran out, instinctively avoiding the treacherous bars of engulfing mud that
lay upstream from some larger obstruction, the deep pools where fish were
leaping. Neither would turn back. Both men realized that.
The vulture picked up a rock as big as his fist and threatened them with it.
They went on, straight for him. Old Jess gave a maniacal scream, hurled the
rock and fled. Rawley ducked. But Peter, coming just behind him, was caught in
the chest. He lurched, slipped on a slimy spot and went down backward on a
rock.
Rawley did not see. He was hot after the old man, who ran awkwardly, his
pockets weighted so that they sagged the full stretch of the cloth, a sample
bag over his shoulder knocking heavily against his back. He headed straight
for the current that boiled, a miniature Colorado, in the channel.
He meant to jump it and gain the other side. He had lost all sense of
proportion. He did not see that a horse could scarcely clear the racing flood.
Rawley shouted a warning just as Old Jess reached the brink. The old vulture
gave a scream, sprang out, and the current caught him and dragged him down.
Rawley ran for a few steps down the plunging stream, put one foot in the
quicksand and hurled himself back just in time. The black, tumbled object that
was Old Jess whirled on.
“The river never gives up its dead; he said it himself,” Rawley exclaimed in
an awed tone to Peter, and turned. But Peter was not behind him, as he had
supposed. Then he saw him lying among a litter of small, mossy rocks.
Up on the bank men were shouting, pointing upriver when Rawley heaved Peter up
on his back and started picking his way toward shore. Rawley glanced up, saw
the stretched arms, looked, and began running.
Up the river, close against shore, looking as if it were hugging the rocks for
protection, a narrow, white line came leaping down upon him. The Colorado was
not a river to submit tamely to the will of man. It had found a weak spot
close inshore, and in the few hours that it had been fretting against its
barrier, it had eaten a way through. Now a slim skirmisher came surging down
through the tunnel the water had made.
Men scrambled down the bluff toward him; well-groomed men with patent leathers
that slipped on the steep bank. They could not help, but neither could they
stand up there with their hands in their pockets and watch.
Rawley did not see them. He did not see that gamboling white line, after the
first glance. He did not see anything, save the next place where he must set
his foot, the next mud bar which he must avoid. His shoulders were bent under
the two-hundred-pound weight of a man he loved as he had never before loved
any man, and he knew that safety might lie in a second,--in one long stride.
The rocks seemed to grow more slippery, more slimy as he went on. The mud
banks seemed to slide in upon him. He had to turn back once, just in time to
avoid a patch of ooze. He imagined that the shore receded, or that he stood
still and moved his feet in one spot. But he fought that notion and forced
himself to believe that he was making time against the small, devouring flood
that was racing down at him. He kept telling himself that the water had twice
as far to travel in order to engulf him as he must go to escape it.
He was right. The water had farther to travel, and he made time. Indeed, the
spectators swore that he made a new record for speed. Running with two hundred
pounds on his back was a feat for any man on smooth going, they told him. Over
that course, it was not an achievement at all; it was a miracle.
However that may be, Rawley used his last ounce of energy to reach the bank. A
gloved hand reached down and caught him. Its mate seized the other wrist. He
gave a final dig with his toes and a scrambling wriggle, and crawled up as
some one pulled Peter off his back and the small torrent swept past.
On a shelf of rock above the watermark he lay back for a minute to breathe
before he essayed to climb the high bank. He looked down at the rush of water,
his eyes wide.
“Lord, I thought it was the whole river coming at me!” he panted disgustedly,
looking up into the face of the Governor, whose hand had reached down to him.
“Why, I could jump that,--almost.”
“Hardly, with a load,” the Governor retorted. “And then, the whole dam may
give way at any moment, now it has started.”
Peter stirred and struggled to sit up. His dazed eyes went down to the new
torrent. The sight stung him to full consciousness. He came up like a lion
wounded but full of fight.
“Come on! We’ve got to shoot in that auxiliary dam,” he shouted thickly.
“I--was going to--anyway. And let this flood down--easy.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
ANOTHER RESCUE
“Going to try for a rescue of the--body?” Jerry Newton looked up from fussing
with one of the best small cameras on the market to-day. He had “got” that
dramatic race with the flood, and he made no apologies for his enterprise. It
was his business to get such scenes.
The Governor pressed his lips together and pointed downward.
“We’re going to save the living,” he said. “Where’s that doctor?”
A shrewd-eyed, tanned man was already feeling of Peter’s skull with finger
tips that seemed to own a detached intelligence.
“Just a simple contusion,” he announced cheerfully. “Put you to sleep for a
minute, though, didn’t it? Here. I’ll fix you up in two shakes so you’ll feel
like new. Let’s have a look at your chest.”
In five minutes Peter was standing steadily on his own feet, ready to go.
Rawley caught his somber glance at the place where Old Jess had disappeared
and shook his head, unconsciously aping the Governor.
“No use, Uncle Peter. I tried to get him. It’s running like a mill race. He
landed square in the middle of it.”
“He did this.” Peter swept his arm out toward the bared river bed while his
eyes sought the Governor’s. “Crazy,--you saw that. My half-brother would have
more sense. The old man did it, to get the gold before the government could
beat him to it.”
He looked from one face to another trying to choose who stood highest in rank.
“I want permission,” he said more firmly, as the doctor’s stimulant took hold,
“to go ahead now and carry out my plans. I warn you, gentlemen, that if that
is not done there may be a great flood. Let me go ahead and shoot in that
auxiliary dam _now_. That will relieve the pressure until we can shoot in more
rock here. If I hold back the flood for you, at my expense, you can do as you
think best with me afterwards, and with the river.”
He threw out a hand toward the mutinous inshore stream.
“That dam is all rock; tons upon tons of it. Inshore is where a channel could
eat through. The cliffs overhang and would prevent a full drop there of broken
rock. I counted on this. It was my natural run-off. If it broke through
anywhere, it would break here. Nature’s a pretty good engineer, gentlemen. But
we’ll make it a safe proposition. We’ll shoot in the auxiliary dam. I want a
free hand in this, or--I can’t answer for the consequences. I warn you.”
The Governor lifted his eyebrows at the great engineer of the party. The
engineer looked at the Chairman of the Commission. He looked at the river.
Plainly, he disliked to give his word, which would carry much weight and which
might lead them astray. Peter walked steadily along, between the Governor and
Rawley, who held him solicitously by the arm.
“You will bear in mind that I have studied this problem all my life,” Peter
added urgently. “I’ve been spending a good deal of money on it. I have laid my
plans very carefully, so as to risk neither lives nor money. The people below
us will be safe, if you let me go ahead. In spite of the high water the Cramer
Dam will hold--if you let me go ahead and finish the job.”
The engineer shut his technical eyes and listened to his common reason. The
Governor was still glancing his way between steps, wanting his opinion.
“There’s a good deal in that,” the engineer said at last. “I should advise
that under the circumstances we permit Mr. Cramer to go ahead and make his dam
as safe as possible. It will not render the present danger any greater. The
longer the Cramer Dam holds, the better chance we will have of averting
disaster. Give me a little time, and I can, I think, promise to get the river
under control without any disastrous flood condition arising.”
Peter’s eyes darkened at the inference, but he had won at least one point.
That, he reflected, was more than might have happened. These were truly great
men; they were greater than their training of keeping well within the red-tape
fences.
“Very well, Mr. Cramer,” the Governor said. “I appoint you to take charge of
the safeguarding of the river against a flood. I cannot promise immediate
funds, however,--”
Peter dismissed that point with a gesture.
“I expected to finance the Cramer Dam from start to finish,” he said bluntly.
“I still expect to do that. All I ask is to be left alone.”
They had reached the flat rock, on the river bank opposite the shacks. Peter
sent a glance that way, saw that the shacks were standing, apparently
unharmed, and dismissed from his mind the thought of danger to his family.
With the engineer beside him, the Governor and others behind him, he kept
straight on to the dam site. He was wondering if that maniac, Old Jess, had
thought to remove the big launch to a safe point around the bend above. If
not, they might not be able to cross the river, should they want to do so.
There were a few ticklish little points in the situation, he was bound to
admit.
Rawley let go his arm and turned away toward the camp, and Peter called after
him.
“Have Gladys and Nevada cook a big breakfast, son. We’ll be back in an hour or
so. And look out for another blast. But it will be a lot farther off than this
one was. Have plenty of hot coffee.”
“You bet!” Rawley promised, his heart curiously light. Angry or pleased,
Nevada was very close. In another minute or two he would see her. There would
be plenty to talk about, besides themselves. Just to hear her voice, he
thought exultantly, would be a panacea for his loneliness.
As he neared the place he stopped as though some one had thrust him back. Then
he went on, running as he had not run from the small flood in the river. The
shacks stood, unharmed save for gaping window sashes, splinters of glass
sticking like flattened icicles to the edges. The porch of Nevada’s rock-faced
dugout cabin stood upright, though slightly twisted. But behind the porch the
rockwork was tumbled in a confused heap.
At a certain place in the ruins, Anita was whimpering and tearing at the rock
with her fingers. Two of the older children were trying to help. It was the
sight of these which filled Rawley with a cold fear. They would not tear at
the wreck of an empty cabin.
Anita turned and stared at him dully. Then she pointed, her hand shaking as if
she were stricken with palsy.
“In there--Nevada,” she quavered. “My girl die, mebby! Lil time ago, speak to
me. Now don’t speak no more. Mebby die.”
“Get back, out of the way.” Rawley went up, looked at the place where they had
been digging, and caught his breath.
“A little more, and you’d have had the whole thing in on top of her. Don’t you
see that wall just ready to topple? Kid, go get a pick and shovel. I’ll try
the roof.”
He recalled the construction of the place, thanking God that he had spent many
days there. The rock cabin had been set back into the hill, against a rock
ledge of the prevailing granite. That, he felt sure, would hold against
anything but a direct charge of explosives. In the far corner a dark,
closet-like recess had been cut, and roofed with poles, corrugated iron and
the dirt. It was used, he remembered, as a storeroom. It had never been
finished like the two rooms in front. The rock walls were bare, the poles and
iron showed in the low roof.
With pick and shovel he began digging at the roof, which had remained intact.
As he worked he cursed Peter’s thoroughness in constructing the place. The
poles were set rather close together, and they were spiked down to heavy
beams. The oldest boy brought a pinch-bar for that, and Rawley, throwing back
the iron roofing, pried up a pole and let himself down into blackness.
The heavy curtain that hung in the doorway of the storeroom was slit. Beyond,
the room seemed at his first dismayed glance to be completely filled with rock
and débris. Then, quite close, he saw her.
She was sitting before the homemade desk that held her typewriter. Spread out
before her were the books wherein she kept the records of the Cramer Dam. She
had been working on the books when the blast wrecked the place. A beam from
the ceiling had fallen, caught upon another beam, and pinned her down, bowed
over her desk. Perhaps she had been leaning upon her folded arms to rest, when
the shock came. But the beam was lying against her back, holding her down, and
upon that, around it, rocks were piled.